SALT LAKE CITY — In central Utah, plans are underway to build the world’s largest data center.
In northwest Utah, a proposed data center and its famous backer have garnered protests. Politicians who advanced the project lost reelection bids in the recent primary contests.
Yet, data centers already enjoy a certain ubiquity. By one count, Utah has 48 of them.
Most of them are much smaller than the hyperscale ones being developed today.
“This is the trend moving forward is bigger, larger data centers,” said Shon Hiatt, a professor at the University of Southern California who has studied Utah’s data center landscape.
The centers store electronic data and provide the computing that fuels modern life – emails, text messages, web searches and social media scrolling.
Surging through discussions like ones and zeroes are concerns about electricity, gas and water. And there are questions about who really benefits from data centers.
“We sort of solve one problem,” said Michele Beck, who advocates for ratepayers as the director of the Utah Office of Consumer Services, “then we identify the next problem.”
A team of journalists at FOX 13 News has spent months looking at how data centers are impacting Utah – and how they could change the state. In the coming weeks, we will tell you:
- The military ties to the most-controversial data center.
- What it’s like to live next to a data center.
- What really happens inside one.
- How data centers are changing rural Utah.
- What data about you is stored.
- Whether data centers could one day increase what Utahns pay for their utilities.
“It's a really polarized world,” said Mark White, a professor at the University of Illinois who has been studying the rise of data centers in rural communities. “And this is one of those issues that seems to be uniting people from all different political persuasions.”